Ephrons dramatize life through women's wardrobes
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NEW YORK (AP) — First things first: Delia and Nora Ephron are no fashion divas.
Nora owns exactly one skirt. Delia "can't think in a dress."
So who better to create a play from "Love, Loss, and What I Wore," Ilene Beckerman's popular scrapbook-cum-memoir that traces her life through her wardrobe?
"This isn't about fashion — it's about the emotions" women weave into their clothes, Delia says.
The play opens Oct. 1 for a 12-week run at the Westside Theatre, featuring a rotating cast that includes Kristin Chenoweth, Tyne Daly, Rosie O'Donnell, Rhea Perlman and her daughter Lucy DeVito, among others.
The production, which follows readings last winter, marks another serendipitous turn for Beckerman's 1995 book. She wrote it initially for her children and never anticipated publishing it.
But hordes of readers who had never worn Beckerman's rag curls or crinolines could relate to her pairing of couture and reverie, by turns fond and painful.
Among them was Nora Ephron, the writer/director of films including "Julie&Julia" and "Sleepless in Seattle," writer of the Oscar-nominated "When Harry Met Sally ..." and "Silkwood," and the one-time teenage owner of an unfortunate dolman-sleeved sweater. The sort of garment that lay mothballed in a mental bottom drawer, along with its matching set of adolescent memories, until Beckerman's book dug them out.
"I was so completely sucked into it. ... It was so magically, weirdly interactive," Nora said, sharing a sofa in her Manhattan office with her sister, whose screenwriting credits include "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" and whose fashion regrets include a series of childhood items with Mandarin collars.
The play became all the more interactive as the Ephrons elicited stories from friends to help give theatrical shape to Beckerman's minimalist narrative.
Beckerman remains the play's central character under her nickname, Gingy, but more than a dozen others help extend a book rooted heavily in coming of age in the 1940s and 1950s to different generations and social contexts.
For her part, Beckerman says all the additions reflect things she felt, if not experienced, and "it's thrilling to see somebody take what you did and move it a dimension."
The mostly female audience at a recent preview readily laughed and sighed as characters deconstructed boots as symbols of independence, girl-gang attire and spa robes worn in defiance of hospital gowns.
Seated, reading, against a projected backdrop of gathered fabric, five actors dispensed dressing-room commiseration and motherly advice in Greek choruslike sections that director Karen Carpenter archly calls "clotheslines." They also delivered humor cut along classic Ephron lines, such as, "Can't we just stop pretending that anything is going to be the new black?"
Knitting the voices together is a sense of clothes as identities we all try on. Even picking out what to wear to nursery school, Nora Ephron said, marks "one of the first acts of... "
"Individuation," her sister finished with the ease of a longtime collaborator. The two have worked together on a half-dozen screenplays, including "You've Got Mail" and the 2005 film version of TV's "Bewitched."
As daughters of screenwriting power couple Henry and Phoebe Ephron, they and writer sisters Amy and Hallie grew up in a Beverly Hills, Calif., household that was anything but typical.
Yet they weren't immune to the brute forces of fashion and fitting in. Nora Ephron recalls seventh-grade friends mocking dresses she had proudly chosen as "too babyish."
"That memory of mine ... it's so much about wanting to be like everyone else, which is one of the great nightmare things of clothing: Do you want to look completely individual and have your absolutely own style," she said, "or do you just want to melt into the background and wear black?"
Several "Love, Loss" characters probe the ties between clothes and persona; one surveys her self-image as measured by her prom dresses. The scene resonates with Daly, who was so torn between a sleek purple velvet gown and a pale, plaid shepherdess-style dress that she wore them both to the same high-school prom, changing midway through.
The play is "charming and also kind of deceptively simple," Daly, who plays Gingy in the first cast and other characters later in the run, said in a telephone interview. "And at the same time, it's really moving."
For all its lighthearted riffs, "Love, Loss" deals frankly with sickness, violence and heartbreak. Carpenter said she kept the staging simple to spotlight the show's storytelling and intimacy.
"The play lies in that honest moment of change, that moment of loss or that moment of love," she said.
If the script is sometimes wrenching, creating it wasn't, the Ephrons said.
"Of all my writing experiences, I think (this was) one of the less painful," Delia said.
"Should we go and have some pain?" Nora asked.
"No — not on this one," Delia answered.
